As a global coalition on Big Data and development, Data-Pop Alliance works together with different actors to promote a people-centered revolution on these technologies. We took advantage of the visit of its program manager, Natalie Shoup, to Barcelona to talk about the challenges and risks of Big Data and Analytics, especially regarding education and development. According to Shoup, we need to engage people both in data literacy and in the ethical and legal discussions around those technologies. Check out her reflections in the short video below.

What if all the health information we generate online was available for scientists to get relevant knowledge from it? That is the starting point of DataDonors, a campaign by The Wikilife Foundation (non-profit), which is asking volunteers to donate their online data so that researchers can produce faster knowledge on health issues. In this short video, its responsible for science programs, María Binaghi, shares with us some reflections regarding the main question of this blog. This contribution was possible thanks to the kind collaboration of the OuiShare Fest Barcelona event.

A specialist in education technology and e-learning, Darcy Hardy believes that the more data we have the better we can serve our students, but she also alerts that the information derived from that data has to be defined properly and acted upon by the correspondent administration. Check her thoughts on the blog’s main question in the short video below, where she also reflects on how analytics can be useful and about concerns linked to privacy issues. Her contribution was possible thanks to the kind collaboration of the EDEN Conference held in Barcelona.

According to computer scientist Nuria Oliver, there are three main key elements regarding big data in education, being the first one the so promised personalization, so that teachers could get precise information of how students are doing and thus adapt their methodology to specific needs. Secondly, large scale data could also be extremely useful for official statistics: e.g., how a city, a specific region or even a whole country is doing in terms of education. And, finally, we also need to make sure students’ data is securely stored and kept under high privacy standards. We would like to thank the TEDxBarcelona Education event for this contribution.

By Sara M. Watson, technology critic and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

What would it take to map the Internet? Not just the links, connecting the web of sites to each other, or some map of the network of networks. That’s hard enough in itself.

What if we were to map the flows of data around the Internet? Not just delivering packets, but what those packets contain, where they propagate, how they are passed on, and to what ends they are used.

Between our browser history, cookies, social platforms, sensors, brokers, and beyond, there are myriad parties with economic interests in our data. How those parties interconnect and trade in our data is, for the most part, opaque to us.

What advantages entail the use of big data in education? Are there issues against it? How the big data and analytics revolution will transform learning in the following years? And what will be the role of the teachers in this new scenario? Aape Pohjavirta is a passionate of new ways of learning — and a big Asimov fan — who gives us his point of view on these questions in the short video below. This contribution would not have been possible without the kind collaboration of the TEDxBarcelona Education event.

Every day we generate a huge amount of big data, but we need to resort to analytics to make abstract information meaningful and get valuable knowledge from it. In education, learning platforms let us easily gather an immense quantity of data regarding students’ behaviour, interactions, preferences and opinions. When properly analysed — through learning analytics — all these data might provide useful insight on how to make learning processes more adaptive, attractive and efficient.

Are these techniques allowing us to provide better support to our students? Are we taking advantage of big data and analytics to help shape the citizens of the future?